Date Conversion Demystified

UniVerse's date conversion power is above what you can find in most databases.
For example, where could you so easily create a query such as

LIST ORDERS WITH [[ORDER_DATE]] LIKE "...AUG 2003"

without having to stuff around with CAST and all kinds of other ugly constructs?

In programming, dates are handled by the ICONV function, which converts from external (human-readable) format to internal format (number of days since 31 Dec 1967), and by the OCONV function, which converts from internal format to external format. These are best considered separately.